The Exorsister

Excerpt

I come home and my sister is possessed. She’s crawling across the popcorn ceiling of her apartment, greenpeasoup goo dripping from her lips. When she sees me, she hisses and scurries to the top left corner of the kitchen. She hangs upside down above the stack of unwashed, pasta-encrusted dishes I’ve been ignoring for days. Just one of the many neglected chores I’m responsible for in exchange for a cheaper share of the rent.

“Are you drunk again?” she asks and spews sludge across the white tile floor.

I am. But I don’t tell her.

*

I call Tiffany in the morning. Her dad is also possessed. She and her wife have locked him in the basement and blocked the door with their old, coffee-stained couch.

“Have you called an exorcist?” I ask her. I have to shout. My sister is in the other room screaming in a language I can’t understand.

“They’re all backed up. We have an appointment but it’s like another four weeks away. I hear it doesn’t even always work,” Tiffany says.

Nic Anstett

Nic Anstett, a writer from Baltimore, MD, loves the bizarre, spectacular, and queer. She is a graduate from the University of Oregon’s MFA program and has attended workshops through the Clarion Foundation, Lambda Literary, and Tin House, where she was a 2021 scholar. Her published and forthcoming fiction can be found in Witness Magazine, Passages North, Michigan Quarterly Review, North American Review, Lightspeed, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. Nic has also written essays and articles for publications such as Autostraddle and Tor.com. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories and a novel.

Patrick Ryan on “The Exorsister”

“The Exorsister” is a story about two grownup sisters. One is a trans woman who has discovered that transitioning doesn’t necessarily mean you leave all your old troubles behind. She drank too much before; she drinks too much now. She used to see herself as a bad older brother; now she sees herself as a bad older sister, one who doesn’t have her act together and has had to move in with her younger sibling—who, at the beginning of the story, has just become demonically possessed.

Because in the world of this story (which the author builds with astounding brevity), there’s been a rash of demonic possessions—a plague of them, all over the world. You never know who’s going to turn next. Could be your sibling, could be you. And there aren’t enough exorcists in the world to tend to all the possessed.

Stories sometimes quietly open themselves to reveal other stories, and sometimes those stories open up too. So it is with “The Exorsister,” which somehow manages to be horrifying, funny, and moving. One Story is delighted to be publishing this highly original story about change, acceptance, and envy by Nic Anstett.